From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegration

The Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today’s Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Cockburn explores the vast geopolitical struggle that is the Sunni–Shia conflict, a clash that shapes the war on terror, western military interventions, the evolution of the insurgency, the civil wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria, the Arab Spring, the fall of regional dictators, and the rise of Islamic State.

As Cockburn shows in arresting detail, Islamic State did not explode into existence in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, as conventional wisdom would have it. The organization gestated over several years in occupied Iraq, before growing to the point where it can threaten the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western journalist to warn of the dangers posed by Islamic State. His originality and breadth of vision make The Age of Jihad the most in-depth analysis of the regional crisis in the Middle East to date.

Reviews

“Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody
else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges
wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and
his ability make connections is phenomenal.”

– Judges of the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award 2014

“Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in the Middle East today.”

– Seymour M. Hersh

“It is a brilliant tour d'horizon of the new wars, a chronicle compiled from despatches, notes and diaries. No one could be better placed for this task and no one else could have produced such a lucid and comprehensive account.”

“This book is required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand the disaster. It should be compulsory reading for politicians, diplomats, defence chiefs and the academic think-tanks whose members make confident predictions, usually confounded by what follows.”

“His reports coalesce here, giving life and shape to the forces of terror currently shaping the region and beyond. The book serves as a strong argument for sharpening the mind of each and every politician responsible for the continuing calamity”

– GQ

“Likely to be a reference for future scholars. Cockburn's dispatches make for a somber, vivid, and gripping work of eyewitness history.”

“One of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq.”

– Sidney Blumenthal, in an email to Hillary Clinton

“A compelling series of dispatches from a journalist who has learned the hard golden rule in Iraq: 'to forecast the worst possible outcome.'”

– Kirkus Reviews

“Cockburn wears his opinions on his sleeve—informed opinions, that project an aura of the New (now oldish) Left—so you can get an honest take on his perspective. That perspective can be dizzying, both panoptic and intimate.”

It has become popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled "Jihad vs. McWorld." The globalising powers of capitalism ("McWorld") are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels "Jihad" — the variety of tribal particularisms and "narrowly conceived faiths" opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the "universal" force of the market.

The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of "McJihad." It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements. It may be true that we need a better understanding of the local forces that oppose the globalisation of capital; but, more than this, we need a better understanding of the so-called global forces of capital.